Goodreads Description:First there are nightmares.Every night Ellie is haunted by terrifying dreams of monstrous creatures that are hunting her, killing her.

Then come the memories.When Ellie meets Will, she feels on the verge of remembering something just beyond her grasp. His attention is intense and romantic, and Ellie feels like her soul has known him for centuries. On her seventeenth birthday, on a dark street at midnight, Will awakens Ellie’s power, and she knows that she can fight the creatures that stalk her in the grim darkness. Only Will holds the key to Ellie’s memories, whole lifetimes of them, and when she looks at him, she can no longer pretend anything was just a dream.

Now she must hunt.Ellie has power that no one can match, and her role is to hunt and kill the reapers that prey on human souls. But in order to survive the dangerous and ancient battle of the angels and the Fallen, she must also hunt for the secrets of her past lives and truths that may be too frightening to remember.

Why it’s worth it: Okay, I know what you’re thinking. That blurb sounds kind of corny. HANG IN THERE WITH ME.

I got into Angelfire kind of on a whim, back when angels were big but I was being seriously bored by a lot of the other stuff out there. I saw the sword on the cover and instantly knew that this was going to be something different, and maybe something closer to what I was looking for. I was right.

Okay, so Angelfire is a bit predictable, especially looking back on it all these years. However, what I also saw as the merits then are still serious merits now. In so many other angel books I was reading, the girl never got to be the hero. She was the human or less-that-the-guy angel who didn’t really get to do anything cool. Ellie isn’t like that at all. SHE is the warrior, and it’s up to HER to save the day. The lore fed into the angels think in a really cool, unexpected way. The books were also REALLY fast paced and action packed. In my review of the second book, Wings of the Wicked, I start off by saying that I had to read that book in one sitting because I couldn’t find a place to put it down!

The romance, while kind of cutesy, also struck me as just … good. I really believed that these guys had a connection across reincarnations and time, and I understood why they struggled because of that. Will and Ellie were partners, not one-over-the-other protectors. Will doesn’t like it when Ellie puts herself in danger, but he lets her do what she needs to because he knows that she’s strong enough to take it. They fight each other, they find each other, and they really love each other. That’s enough for me to be happy.

While I mention in my review of the last book, Shadows in the Silence, that I was a little bit iffy on the ending, the only reason is that it happened too quick. That’s not surprising, however, since these books are SO fast paced. And if that’s my only complaint, it’s still VERY MUCH worth it to read!

Alright, folks, guess I got the Valentines themed one. This is amusing, because one blogger on this site is bitter about Valentines this year and one is not and GUESS WHO’S DOING THIS LIST! But no, actually, this list is still going to be really hard to put together. Gosh. Uh. Well, here’s some in no particular order!

You know, I went into this list expecting it to be a lot harder to pick. As it turns out, I got REALLY skimpy with my 5 star ratings this year! Wow. That’s just crazy. Here are almost ALL of the books I have 5 stars to this year!

This is a fairly tough list for me, but I think I managed to cull it down to 10 books I’m happy with. These books are in no particular order, except that the last 3 or so didn’t get a full 5 star rating on Goodreads.

Tessa Gray should be happy – aren’t all brides happy?Yet as she prepares for her wedding, a net of shadows begins to tighten around the Shadowhunters of the London Institute.A new demon appears, one linked by blood and secrecy to Mortmain, the man who plans to use his army of pitiless automatons, the Infernal Devices, to destroy the Shadowhunters. Mortmain needs only one last item to complete his plan. He needs Tessa. And Jem and Will, the boys who lay equal claim to Tessa’s heart, will do anything to save her.

4 ½ stars

So this is it. And so soon after the end of Shadows in the Silence, too. I literally may die. I can’t handle this. Even if Cassie is going to be writing like a bajillion more Shadowhunter books.

This book starts out much like you might expect: Tessa is trying out a wedding dress, Jem’s in love, Will’s moody because all the women in his life seem to do is vex him and Benedict Lightwood has transformed into a giant bug thing because of demon pox.

Oh wait. No, I wasn’t expecting that last bit there.

The inciting incident of this novel is, in fact, that Benedict Lightwood has becoming a giant bug demon and that he ate his son in law. Gabriel Lightwood has nowhere to go but the London Institute for help. Charlotte is of course going to give it to him, without telling the Clave because of the shame it would cause the Lightwood family. Let the games begin!

Interestingly enough, these events are also interspersed with correspondence between the Clave and the Consul, telling the Consul that they are considering Charlotte as the new Consul. The characters have no idea this is going on, but we get a sense that the Consul has bad plans for Charlotte to keep her from getting his job. Throughout the book, these letters will keep cropping up to advise us of where the Clave is in their plans and just exactly what the Consul is thinking without making him a major POV character. It was a really interesting device, and I think it worked really well.

If you were expecting all the feels with this book, though, you’d be right. There is not one character mentioned who doesn’t rip at your heart strings. (I know the cliché is tug at your heart strings. This is way too tame for this book.) Even Gabriel Lightwood realizes he has a soul. The relationship between Will, Jem and Tessa continues to build, to the point where I almost couldn’t stand the idea that she would pick one over the other. But more on that later.

The plot was pretty good in this one, if a little over laden with dialogue sometimes. The most gorgeous moments in this book do occur through dialogue, but even I wished sometimes that somebody would just kill something. At the same time, the amount of character development was striking and I would have hated to not have had a moment of it. But just don’t expect all that much action.

So I know the big thing here is: who does she end up with? Well, I’m not going to tell you, obviously. I WILL tell you that if you want to be surprised by the ending, don’t get curious as to why the inside of your hard cover book jacket sparkles. There’s a family tree in there that tells you all you need to know and I looked at it way too soon.

This is mostly for my folks who’ve already read the ending and want to know what I think, but without spoilers so those of you who haven’t can try to puzzle it out. I thought the ending was heartbreakingly perfect—until the epilogue. I’ve read Cassie’s explanation for why she added the epilogue, but I’m still not sure I like it. On the one hand, the romantic in me finds it absolutely perfect. On the other hand, the reasoning that led Tessa to make her original decision just broke my heart in all the right places. It said so much about the beauty of their whole relationship. I may have died inside when she made the choice, but I probably could have come to grips with it a lot faster than this whole epilogue thing.

This review has already gone on way too long, but I had to make this a perfect send off. I will always love The Mortal Instruments, but the level of writing in The Infernal Devices is just off the charts. I love the characters in TMI, but the TID characters just break my heart, and I can’t stand to see them go. Thank you for a breathtakingly beautiful story, Cassie. I have to go cry again now.

Your strength in heart and hand will fall. . . .Ellie knows that the darkest moments are still to come, and she has everything to fight for:

She must fight for Will.The demonic have resorted to their cruelest weapons to put Will in mortal danger, and Ellie makes an unlikely alliance to save him and to stop Lilith and Sammael, who seek to drown the world in blood and tear a hole into Heaven.

She must fight for humanity.As the armies of Hell rise and gather for the looming End of Days, Ellie and her band of allies travel to the world’s darkest and most ancient regions in her quest to come into her full glory as the archangel Gabriel.

And Ellie must save herself.Her humanity withers beneath the weight of her cold archangel power, but Ellie must hold tight to who she is and who she loves as she prepares for the ultimate battle for Heaven and Earth.

In this final installment in the Angelfire trilogy, Courtney Allison Moulton brings her dark world of epic battles and blistering romance to a blazing bright conclusion.

Well. It’s finally here. It’s finally the end. I can’t believe it. I won’t believe it. Even though I must.

Shadows in the Silence picks up right where Wings of the Wicked left off. Ellie has a sword leveled at Cadan, demanding that he help her find someone who can help heal Will, who is slowly dying.

At this point, the book starts its favorite thing to do: travel. I have no idea how Ellie was able to get enough time off from school to travel around the world three times, but it happened. (Okay, I’m exaggerating, but there was a LOT of travelling.) Usually I get annoyed when a book bops around like that, but for this one it worked. Ellie has a lot of history all over the place, and it makes sense that so is her legacy. I think there was only one trip where I felt like “Okay, this had no point but to further these characters’s relationship,” but it was Will and Ellie so that was totally okay. (Yes, Will ends up being fine. That’s not a huge spoiler, I’m sure.)

Guys. Will and Ellie. Guys. I love this couple so much. I love who dedicated they are to each other and just…all of the feelings. Those worrying that Will’s incapacitation will mean few Will and Ellie scenes can stop. The scenes that they do have are so powerful. I’m really going to miss these guys as a couple.

I also particularly enjoyed how, despite this being the last book, other characters got room to expand. I say this in terms of Cadan and Will especially. Even Marcus was given a little more meat. In a book that could have been completely about Ellie, these guys got some time to shine too, and it really made the whole book connect even better.

*MILD SPOILERS BELOW*

Ellie’s transformation was, of course, the focal point of this book, since this is the final book. One of my only problems in this book was that so much of it was spent trying to find a way to defeat all the demons without Ellie having to become Gabriel when it was so obvious that she was going to anyways. And then when she did, Ellie-as-Gabriel had this FANTASTIC moment where she forgot everything that made her Ellie and was entirely Gabriel, but it was over way too fast. I really wish that had been expanded upon, but I guess I can understand why it wasn’t.

*MILD SPOILERS END*

All in all, I thought the end of the book was really well done. The final battle was amazing. I did find the book’s epilogue to be a little corny, but honestly I wouldn’t have had it any other way. Courtney hasn’t disappointed with one second of these series and this was no different. My only real disappointment is that now we have to say goodbye to this universe once and for all. I’m looking forward ridiculously hard to what she’ll do next!

I’m fairly certain this entire topic lives to hurt my soul. ONLY TEN? ONLY TEN? The only way I could even CONCEIVE of doing this was by going by month and just picking the first 10 off the list. I’m ridiculously lucky I made it to March, and that was only through severe jumping of hoops.

I don’t know what it is about this book (well, besides the awesome cover and the freaking fantastic blurb) but I’ve been hooked on it ever since I first heard about it. I feel like it is going to be SUPER fantastic.